BOOKS

Junkyard Jam Band

Making music doesn't have to be about dropping big bucks in the guitar shop or endlessly fiddling with expensive software. When you build your own instruments, creating your own sound comes naturally. Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers is a step-by-step guide to building and modifying a full array of complete musical projects—no previous carpentry or electronics experience required. The book includes a soldering primer for total beginners, along with extra circuits to customize your instruments even further, and a crash course in music theory.

There's a whole lot to like about Junkyard Jam Band: it's written in an easy manner; has heaps of information on physics, acoustics and electronics; a great introduction to electronics skills and if I called the crash course on musical theory anything other than brilliant I would be under-selling it. — the Renaissance Geek

I received a copy of this book two weeks ago and it's already bookmarked, dog-eared and scribbled. Author David Erik Nelson gives step-by-step instructions for some of the craziest freak-out instruments ever to make it in a DIY book …. Highly recommended!— Shane Speal, Guitar World

Best of all is “Bay” by David Erik Nelson, a recontextualization of ghosts that is authentically surprising, genuinely horrifying—an extraordinary achievement in a hackneyed subgenre.
— Nick Gevers, Locus, September 2003 (Recommended Story)included in the anthology The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

[“Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate”] is at one level nearly wacky, but it has deeper concerns, reflected in the examination of the treatment of such disadvantaged individuals as alcoholics, Confederate veterans, the Chinese, Jews, and of course clockwork ex-soldiers. It all comes together very effectively.
— Rich Horton, Locus, July 2008 (Recommended Story)now available as a standalone illustrated ebook

“Whatever Comes After Calcutta” … is really scary horror. One day Lyle is shot by his wife after he discovers her in bed with another man. He survives, and decides to follow them to some place near Calcutta (Ohio). On the way, he happens across a crazy group of cultists trying to hang a woman they are convinced is a witch. So Lyle does the right thing and stops them…. All this is blackly funny, and then Nelson pulls the other one, and the story takes a dark (if still horrifically funny) turn.
— Rich Horton, Locus, March 2018 (Recommended Story)

It was only after reading “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” by David Erik Nelson that I realised I hadn’t recognised him as the author of “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God”, a ‘New Guys’ time-travel novella from last December’s Asimov’s SF. That one was a lively and entertaining story which I enjoyed, and I liked this one even more. … This is a very entertaining and readable story, and what makes it even better is the sheer amount of incidental detail that Nelson includes. At the end, just when I thought it was coming off the boil a little, there is a neat little twist that pulls it back up again, as well as allowing for sequels. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.
— Paul Fraser, SF MAGAZINES, November 2017 (four-star review)